Weird stuff for your brain
I bought volume IV of Outline of Science part II (Man's Material Achievements) at the library the other day. It was published in 1910 and once belonged to Robert Deffeyes. There was a buy one get one free sale so I got Elisha an old hardcover medical book full of Valium ads. Here is the table of contents from my book:
CONTENTS
OUTLINE OF SCIENCE- PART II
I- SOMETHING FOR NEARLY NOTHING.......................7
Chemical Loafers-- Hydrogen, the World's Smallest Giant-- Steel Made With Air-- Inoculating Metals-- Chromium, the Newcomer-- Barium at $12,000,000 an Ounce.
II- NEW PRODUCTS FROM OLD MATERIALS...................26
Money from Smoke-- Coal-Burning Motor-Cars-- Perfume from the Coal Pile-- Bringing the Rainbow to Earth-- Is Glass a Gift of Nature?-- The New Structural Material, Glass-- A Chemical Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
III- MODERN MIRACLES..................................47
Heavy Jobs for Bacteria and Molds-- Peace-Time Dividends from a War Service-- Clothes from the Chemist's Test-Tube-- Beefsteaks from the Air.
IV- THE CELLULOSE AGE.................................63
Clothes Made of Sunlight-- Farming Chemicals-- By-products of the Farm-- Chemistry and Cotton-- Cotton Billiard Balls.
V- OUR MECHANICAL WONDERLAND...........................79
Light Waves, the foundation of Modern Industry-- The Steel Chef's Job-- Flowing Metals Together-- When It Pays to Junk Good Machines-- Mechanical Donkeys for Logging-- Have We Become Tunnel-Minded!
VI- MAN DEFEATS THE ELEMENTS...........................99
Push-Button Weather-- Air Sewage-- Permanent Peace with the Mississippi-- Men Killed by Milk Explosions-- Battling with Icebergs-- Fires that Start Themselves-- Man-made Lightning.
VII- ELECTRICAL SLAVES.................................121
Robots that See, Hear, Taste, Smell, Feel, Think, and Talk-- Robot Locomotive Engineers-- Subway Safety-- Speeding up the Railways-- Talking Movies-- Television-- Radio By-products-- Rivaling the Sun.
VIII- POWER...........................................145
Fuelless Motors-- Wind-Power-- Harnessing the Ocean-- Heat from Cold-- Power from the Earth's Interior-- Rockets for Motive Power-- Diesel Engines-- The Trend in Railroad Locomotives-- Our Power Resources.
IX- PUTTING WAVES TO WORK.............................170
Secret Signaling-- Colored Motion Pictures-- X-Rays Now Work Overtime-- The Photomicrograph, the Police of the Metals-- Prospecting by Radio-- Sound Waves and Architecture-- Sounds We Cannot Hear.
X- THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR............................191
Metal Planes, all Wings and Tail-- Speeding up the Take-Off-- Airplane Engines-- Flying Blind-- Metal Planes Lighter than Air.
My parents were at the library with me, and my dad immediately started searching for the rest of the volumes online and buying them for me. I have already skipped ahead and there are no actual milk-related fatalities, which makes me doubtful about beefsteaks from the air and clothes from sunlight and money from smoke. Even without these catchy taglines, though, I feel compelled to listen to anyone who will talk to me about spontaneous combustion.
Apparently the United States Department of Agriculture "assigned a staff of scientists to study this problem" in order to combat the pesky issue of barn fires caused by spontaneously combusting hay. Their breakthrough came from the Vermont floods of 1927, where a significant number of barns that had previously been submerged in as much as 17 feet of water afterwards burned to the ground. In some places, there were still several feet of standing water, and the barns would burn down to the water's surface. Bacteria was determined to be the culprit, the growth of which was encouraged by the flood conditions.
All of this burning barn business makes me think of spontaneous human combustion, which is much more scary and interesting. Internet research has brought me to the conclusion that modern-day scientists do not operate as effectively as their mystery-solving predecessors. For example, rather than lobbying the United States Department of, I don't know, terrifying and unlikely ways to die, so that they can form a task force of scientist to solve this problem, they would rather stand around in lab coats trying to melt a pig carcass like a candle.
That's because spontaneous human combustion may just be another way that your fat can kill you. According to the prevailing theory, it can maintain a smolder that incinerates bones more effectively than cremation. I have no way to effectively segue from that to my next point, other than to share the paranoid thought that Wikipedia may well be fucking with me. Because that thought is much less alarming than the alternative, which is that the endeavors I'm about to relate were considered, even briefly, as viable military strategies.
I do like animals, and the idea of them being used as instruments of war is obviously disgusting and inhumane. But thanks to certain fucked individuals, the circumstances of such use can be hilarious. For example, the Bat Bomb, a "bomb-shaped casing with numerous compartments, each containing a Mexican Free-tailed Bat with a small timed incendiary bomb attached." Why? "Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats which would then roost in eaves and attics. The incendiaries would start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper construction of the Japanese cities that were the weapon's intended target."
Well. Desperate times call for desperate measures, right? World War II was a desperate time, and dropping buckets of bats with tiny bombs tied to their legs over Japan certainly qualifies as a desperate measure. By desperate times, I mean that the idea was pitched by some random dental surgeon, and Roosevelt not only listened to him, but gave the plan a thumbs-up.
If you are wondering how far this went before people realized that attaching bombs to tiny mammals and then setting them loose was a disastrously unpredictable idea, the answer is very. At the Auxiliary Army Air Base in New Mexico, test bats decided to roost under a fuel tank and blew the test range to hell. Obviously, further testing was called for, and the budget for "Project X-ray" eventually reached 2 million before it gave way to the clearly more effective atomic bomb. That's two million dollars in the 1940s, mind you. Why the two projects were never combined is unclear.
A (possibly?) more humane use of military animals might be the British Special Ops dead rat plan. Also arising out of World War II, this plan involved hiding explosives inside of rat carcasses that they snuck into German factories. With no means of actually detonating said bombs, phase two involved crossing their fingers and hoping that whoever found the dead rat decided to dispose of it by tossing it into a furnace. This may seem like a poor use of resources-- leaving bombs around in the hopes that your enemies will accidentally detonate them for you hardly sounds reliable. On the other hand, putting a dead rat in someone's basement is so clearly a page from the jilted lover playbook that it makes one wonder if the rest of the British Special Ops meetings consisted of calling Germany and hanging up, then reassuring themselves they're better off without all of that drama.
This was apparently the heyday for ill-conceived animal bombs. It seems that the lack of sufficiently advanced technology was really making it hard to bomb the shit out of people. With that in mind, I ask you to let the phrase "Project Pigeon" wash over you. Nothing as fancy as bats or dead rats here-- just a trained pigeon stuck inside a missile, pecking at a screen to steer the missile after its target. Now, according to Wikipedia, the National Defense Research Committee was properly "skeptical" of this plan and it is to their credit that they only sank $25,000 into this shit show before they decided not to entrust missile guidance to any creature so simple as to be confounded by the idea of windows.
This project was also known as "Project Orcon," with Orcon being an abbreviation of Organic Control. In this way these guys knew what the team behind "Project X-Ray" knew: the only thing standing between you and military funding is the need for a badass project name. Master that, and people will pay you to train tiny bird pilots or drive around the country gathering bats to throw on Japan. If the British had spent less time cutting out rodent entrails and more time developing a snazzy top-secret name, well, it would probably still have been depressingly ineffective, but they might have at least had more financing for dead rats.
CONTENTS
OUTLINE OF SCIENCE- PART II
I- SOMETHING FOR NEARLY NOTHING.......................7
Chemical Loafers-- Hydrogen, the World's Smallest Giant-- Steel Made With Air-- Inoculating Metals-- Chromium, the Newcomer-- Barium at $12,000,000 an Ounce.
II- NEW PRODUCTS FROM OLD MATERIALS...................26
Money from Smoke-- Coal-Burning Motor-Cars-- Perfume from the Coal Pile-- Bringing the Rainbow to Earth-- Is Glass a Gift of Nature?-- The New Structural Material, Glass-- A Chemical Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
III- MODERN MIRACLES..................................47
Heavy Jobs for Bacteria and Molds-- Peace-Time Dividends from a War Service-- Clothes from the Chemist's Test-Tube-- Beefsteaks from the Air.
IV- THE CELLULOSE AGE.................................63
Clothes Made of Sunlight-- Farming Chemicals-- By-products of the Farm-- Chemistry and Cotton-- Cotton Billiard Balls.
V- OUR MECHANICAL WONDERLAND...........................79
Light Waves, the foundation of Modern Industry-- The Steel Chef's Job-- Flowing Metals Together-- When It Pays to Junk Good Machines-- Mechanical Donkeys for Logging-- Have We Become Tunnel-Minded!
VI- MAN DEFEATS THE ELEMENTS...........................99
Push-Button Weather-- Air Sewage-- Permanent Peace with the Mississippi-- Men Killed by Milk Explosions-- Battling with Icebergs-- Fires that Start Themselves-- Man-made Lightning.
VII- ELECTRICAL SLAVES.................................121
Robots that See, Hear, Taste, Smell, Feel, Think, and Talk-- Robot Locomotive Engineers-- Subway Safety-- Speeding up the Railways-- Talking Movies-- Television-- Radio By-products-- Rivaling the Sun.
VIII- POWER...........................................145
Fuelless Motors-- Wind-Power-- Harnessing the Ocean-- Heat from Cold-- Power from the Earth's Interior-- Rockets for Motive Power-- Diesel Engines-- The Trend in Railroad Locomotives-- Our Power Resources.
IX- PUTTING WAVES TO WORK.............................170
Secret Signaling-- Colored Motion Pictures-- X-Rays Now Work Overtime-- The Photomicrograph, the Police of the Metals-- Prospecting by Radio-- Sound Waves and Architecture-- Sounds We Cannot Hear.
X- THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR............................191
Metal Planes, all Wings and Tail-- Speeding up the Take-Off-- Airplane Engines-- Flying Blind-- Metal Planes Lighter than Air.
My parents were at the library with me, and my dad immediately started searching for the rest of the volumes online and buying them for me. I have already skipped ahead and there are no actual milk-related fatalities, which makes me doubtful about beefsteaks from the air and clothes from sunlight and money from smoke. Even without these catchy taglines, though, I feel compelled to listen to anyone who will talk to me about spontaneous combustion.
Apparently the United States Department of Agriculture "assigned a staff of scientists to study this problem" in order to combat the pesky issue of barn fires caused by spontaneously combusting hay. Their breakthrough came from the Vermont floods of 1927, where a significant number of barns that had previously been submerged in as much as 17 feet of water afterwards burned to the ground. In some places, there were still several feet of standing water, and the barns would burn down to the water's surface. Bacteria was determined to be the culprit, the growth of which was encouraged by the flood conditions.
All of this burning barn business makes me think of spontaneous human combustion, which is much more scary and interesting. Internet research has brought me to the conclusion that modern-day scientists do not operate as effectively as their mystery-solving predecessors. For example, rather than lobbying the United States Department of, I don't know, terrifying and unlikely ways to die, so that they can form a task force of scientist to solve this problem, they would rather stand around in lab coats trying to melt a pig carcass like a candle.
That's because spontaneous human combustion may just be another way that your fat can kill you. According to the prevailing theory, it can maintain a smolder that incinerates bones more effectively than cremation. I have no way to effectively segue from that to my next point, other than to share the paranoid thought that Wikipedia may well be fucking with me. Because that thought is much less alarming than the alternative, which is that the endeavors I'm about to relate were considered, even briefly, as viable military strategies.
I do like animals, and the idea of them being used as instruments of war is obviously disgusting and inhumane. But thanks to certain fucked individuals, the circumstances of such use can be hilarious. For example, the Bat Bomb, a "bomb-shaped casing with numerous compartments, each containing a Mexican Free-tailed Bat with a small timed incendiary bomb attached." Why? "Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats which would then roost in eaves and attics. The incendiaries would start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper construction of the Japanese cities that were the weapon's intended target."
Well. Desperate times call for desperate measures, right? World War II was a desperate time, and dropping buckets of bats with tiny bombs tied to their legs over Japan certainly qualifies as a desperate measure. By desperate times, I mean that the idea was pitched by some random dental surgeon, and Roosevelt not only listened to him, but gave the plan a thumbs-up.
If you are wondering how far this went before people realized that attaching bombs to tiny mammals and then setting them loose was a disastrously unpredictable idea, the answer is very. At the Auxiliary Army Air Base in New Mexico, test bats decided to roost under a fuel tank and blew the test range to hell. Obviously, further testing was called for, and the budget for "Project X-ray" eventually reached 2 million before it gave way to the clearly more effective atomic bomb. That's two million dollars in the 1940s, mind you. Why the two projects were never combined is unclear.
A (possibly?) more humane use of military animals might be the British Special Ops dead rat plan. Also arising out of World War II, this plan involved hiding explosives inside of rat carcasses that they snuck into German factories. With no means of actually detonating said bombs, phase two involved crossing their fingers and hoping that whoever found the dead rat decided to dispose of it by tossing it into a furnace. This may seem like a poor use of resources-- leaving bombs around in the hopes that your enemies will accidentally detonate them for you hardly sounds reliable. On the other hand, putting a dead rat in someone's basement is so clearly a page from the jilted lover playbook that it makes one wonder if the rest of the British Special Ops meetings consisted of calling Germany and hanging up, then reassuring themselves they're better off without all of that drama.
This was apparently the heyday for ill-conceived animal bombs. It seems that the lack of sufficiently advanced technology was really making it hard to bomb the shit out of people. With that in mind, I ask you to let the phrase "Project Pigeon" wash over you. Nothing as fancy as bats or dead rats here-- just a trained pigeon stuck inside a missile, pecking at a screen to steer the missile after its target. Now, according to Wikipedia, the National Defense Research Committee was properly "skeptical" of this plan and it is to their credit that they only sank $25,000 into this shit show before they decided not to entrust missile guidance to any creature so simple as to be confounded by the idea of windows.
This project was also known as "Project Orcon," with Orcon being an abbreviation of Organic Control. In this way these guys knew what the team behind "Project X-Ray" knew: the only thing standing between you and military funding is the need for a badass project name. Master that, and people will pay you to train tiny bird pilots or drive around the country gathering bats to throw on Japan. If the British had spent less time cutting out rodent entrails and more time developing a snazzy top-secret name, well, it would probably still have been depressingly ineffective, but they might have at least had more financing for dead rats.
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